Ich werde hier sein im Sonnenschein und im Schatten

Christian Kracht

3 ideas

1. Black Commissar Pursues Officer Into Réduit

   In a timeline where Lenin stayed in Zurich and founded a Swiss Soviet Republic, the SSR has been at war with German and English fascists for roughly a century and relies on soldiers and cadres from its African territories. The unnamed narrator, a commissar from Nyasaland educated in Swiss socialist institutions, is ordered to arrest the renegade Jewish colonel Brazhinsky. The pursuit takes him through a devastated landscape into the Réduit, the vast Alpine fortress honeycombed into the mountains. What he finds there leads him to abandon his mission and his loyalty to the state and return to Africa.

2. The Fortress as Self-Justifying Void

   The Réduit is presented as the heart and last refuge of the state, the place that gives the endless war its meaning. Yet at its centre the project turns out to have no purpose beyond its own continuation: the mountain has been hollowed out for a defence of nothing. The mechanism is that a permanent emergency needs a sacred inner sanctum, and that sanctum can be empty as long as nobody reaches it.

3. Colonized Subject as Truest Believer

   The African narrator has absorbed Swiss socialist ideals, manners, and landscape-worship more completely than the Swiss themselves. His faith lets the reader see the empire's ideals from inside, and that makes it all the more telling when the ideals collapse. The lens: an imperial ideology is most clearly revealed, and most decisively refuted, through the eyes of the outsider it has trained to embody it.

Save and mark ideas in the app